Keep the Change by Thomas McGuane Page A

I used to listen. We kind of formed a picture. Someday, we thought … Hawaii! Well, Joe, let’s really do call it a day.” Lureen led him up the narrow wood stairs to the second floor. Joe tried to think of surf, a ukulele calling to him from the night-shrouded side of a sacred volcano, of outrigger canoes. He tried to put Smitty and Lureen in this scene and he just couldn’t. Nothing could uproot them from their unhappy home. Not even a no-holds-barred luau.
    Joe’s old room looked onto a narrow rolling street. Lureen wanted him to spend the night before going back to the ranch in the morning. You could make out the railroad bridge and the big rapid river beyond. There was a stand next to his door with a pitcher of water on it. Joe’s bed had been turned back. The room was sparely furnished with a small desk where Lureenstored her things: paper clips, Chapsticks, pencils. Joe pulled open the drawer as he’d loved to do thirty years before to smell the camphor from the Chapsticks. The pencils were in hard yellow bundles, the paper clips in small green cardboard boxes. The train went over the bridge like a comet, the little faces in the lighted windows racing through their lives. Joe’s father had been raised here; his uncles had gone to two world wars from here; educations and paper routes and bar examinations had been prepared for in the kitchen here. Everyone rushing for the end like the people on the train. Smitty came home from the war after a booby trap had killed his best friend and stayed drunk for two years in the very room he occupied now. Joe’s father used to say, “I went over too.” And Smitty would say, “You didn’t go over where I went over.”
    “Good night,” said Lureen. Family business had worn her out. Instead of acknowledging her exhaustion, she had nominated Hawaii, whose blue-green seas would wash her all clean.
    “Good night, Aunt Lureen,” Joe sang out with love.
    Joe stretched out in the dark, under the covers of the squeaking iron bed. He had slept here off and on his whole life. But now he felt like someone trying to hold a tarp down in the wind. He smoked in the dark. It was perfect. Smoking meant so much more now that he knew what it did to him. But in the dark it was perfect. He could see the cloud of his smoke rise like a ghost.
    He must have fallen asleep because when he heard Smitty’s voice, it was its emphasis that startled him; he had not heard what had gone on before. “For God’s sake, Lureen, we’re in a brownout! Keep the shade drawn.”
    Joe struck a match and looked at the dial of the loud clock ticking away beside him. It was after midnight. A husky laughfrom Smitty rang through the upstairs, a man-of-action laugh. Joe had to have a look.
    Lureen’s room at the end of the hall was well lighted. Smitty and Lureen stood in its doorway like figures on a bandstand. Smitty wore his lieutenant’s uniform and impatiently flipped his forage cap against his thigh. “We move at daybreak,” he said.
    “The bars closed an hour ago,” said Lureen wearily.
    “We pour right in behind the tanks and stay there until we get to Belgium,” he insisted.
    “Smitty,” said Lureen, “I heard the radio! Truman said it’s over!”
    Smitty scrutinized his sister’s features. “Can you trust a man who never earned the job? Harry The Haberdasher never-earned-the-job.”
    “You can trust the radio!” Lureen cried. Smitty stared back.
    “I should have listened, Lureen. I should have listened to you. The nation has probably taken to the streets. Am I still welcome?” Their figures wavered in the sprawling light.
    “The most welcome thing in the world,” said Lureen in a voice that astonished Joe with its feeling. Smitty gave her a hug. Joe watched and tried to understand and was choked by the beauty of their embrace. He wondered why he was so moved by something he couldn’t understand.

11
    This sale yard was a place ranchers took batches of cattle too small to haul to